At the beginning of this week, Mon, Tues, Weds, I attended a conference held at Brighton Dome as part of Brighton Digital Festival. The reason I was able to attend was due to a friend winning a ticket but then being unable to go. In return for the ticket I sent her sum up emails of the days speakers and I will attach that below in case it is useful to anyone else and it is definately useful for me to have all the relevant links and comments together and not in my appalling primary school child handwriting!
Day 1
Kevin Warwick:
Really interesting cyborg guy who looks very normal but was a pioneer in getting technology implanted into himself, such a copper implant that would act as a keycard when he entered his work building and it opened the doors and lights for him!
He asked at the beginning of the talk if anyone would like to have an implant of some technological extension of their body and asked for a show of hands, I thought I wouldn’t want something, thinking of some kind of Terminator situation but then he mentioned that most of us have our pets micro chipped and that these class II implants are becoming increasingly common with nightclubs even using them so customers don’t have to pay for drinks, just scan their implanted chip, say in their arm, at the bar and their account is charged automatically.
He also spoke about some research he and some of his students are undertaking into sensory substitution, e.g having magnets implanted in the fingertips which vibrate as you get near to objects and having electrodes in the shape of letters placed on the tongue and the shape of the letter gets transmitted to the brain, both would be beneficial to blind people for instance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqssQqUvj4
Relly Annet Barker:
She did a presentation about giving presentations and metioned some interesting things like ‘barcamp’ where first time speakers can go to talk about a chosen subject. This talk was particularly helpful for me as I am, like quite a few people out there, shit scared of public speaking!
She also runs Supernice Studio, which I gather is about helping people to get stuff done and to have the confidence to it, the link below is to a project to help give people a kick up the back side over the next 30 days with regards to web content and there are still a few days left to sign up:
http://supernicestudio.com/30days/
Memo Akten:
Epic visual artist, links will do more justice than words – epic!!!! (This is what I wrote in the email to my friend and it still applies here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv1lrjA9UvA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQJAlft1b0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=SPDC836AFF792C013A
The above video is of the process of making Forms, 2012 and Akten worked with my previously mentioned favourites, Quayola.
Stefanie Posavec:
Data Illustrator working with extracting data by hand, e.g. she goes through a book and counts the number of words and sentences and then represents it by hand or using illustrator. She was very apologetic about not knowing how to code and wanting to learn, I also often suffer from this feeling but really I think she has great way of doing things and I agree with her low tech approach. This is something that I will come back to in a separate, future post.
Day 2
Jake Archibald:
He did a talk about the Application Cache for html5, I dutifully sat through the whole talk but had no idea what the hell happened in that hour.
I managed to understand that it was something about making sites useable offline and obviously need to look into this!
Although he is part of the team that set up this site for tracking going to events:
http://lanyrd.com/
Bjarke Myrthu:
He brake danced onto the stage!
He was talking about the fact that people don’t use the internet to mix up genres of use, such as having a film playing with images over the top, he gave some examples:
http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/
http://stormingjuno.com/
He didn’t use this as an example but it’s that same sort of thing, a linkin park video that uses your facebook photo, it’s quite hilarious!
http://lostintheecho.com/
He also is making a website to help people be able to interact all of these mediums, youtube, still photos, sound files, etc together
www.storyplanet.com
Day 3
Gimme 5:
Which is loads of speakers coming on within the hour to talk about what they do or an idea for 5 mins
Will just list the most interesting ones
Luke Whittaker
http://www.stateofplaygames.com/blog/
Adam Onishi
http://www.onishiweb.co.uk/
Pete Hochkin
http://www.headloose.com/
Maikel Sibbald
http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com/
Then there was Simon Collison for the whole hour
Talking about less being more when putting out web content
He has a music website which the background images are inspired by found records in the street but then he set up these photos to get the ones he wanted
urgh can’t find the music site but thought it was called ‘rushmore’
here is his personal site:
http://www.colly.com/
He also mentioned that he loves art using found objects and said he likes the idea of ‘using what’s around and making more of what is little’
His twitter is @colly so maybe tweet him a link to foundism?
Foundism is the site of the friend I was emailing, it asks for submissions for found objects:
www.foundism.co.uk
Joel Baumann:
The best speaker of all!
Really funny and so enthusiastic about his work
Used to be part of:
http://www.tomato.co.uk/
Now doing random shit that he wants to do:
http://nnfenren.com/
http://noog.nnfenren.com/
noogs being the worlds first digital collectables!
NOOG #2 from Nnfenren on Vimeo.
Johanna Kollman:
She talked about collaborating and ways of re thinking the way you work.
http://www.slideshare.net/johannakollmann
Jennifer Milarski-Stermšek 